According to the Institute of Medicine (IOM), medication or pharmaceutical errors harm at least 1.5 million people every year in the United States alone. The IOM further reports that at least one medication error per patient per day has occured in each hospital in the United States during the 2006-2007 timeframe.
More specifically, if a drug is not promptly administered and delivered to a patient to correct a deviation from normal physiological parameters, a series of abnormal functions by the patient's body may result. For example, a patient under anesthesia during surgery may require prompt intervention to maintain certain systems and functions of the patient's body such as blood pressure, fluid balance and the like. An anesthesiologist or certified registered nurse anesthetist often must quickly use drugs at various different concentrations to counteract the stress on these systems and functions due to the surgery.
To administer and deliver a drug quickly to a patient, health care providers use routes of administration such as intravenous (IV) access to deliver drugs in liquid form to the patient. Many drugs are formulated to be administered by pump, IV container or by syringe and are pre-filled into these drug devices or containers for administration. A drug in the device or container is also formulated at a predetermined concentration to enable a suitable dose of the drug to be delivered in an appropriate volume, thereby eliminating the need for recalculating the dose or diluting the drug prior to its administration or between administrations. When using pre-filled syringes, for example, each containing a predetermined concentration of the drug for quick delivery of a drug to a patient, a health care provider (such as an anesthesiologist) must have readily available multiple similar syringes for multiple drugs and multiple similar syringes of different concentrations of the same drug. This may increase the likelihood of medication errors.
Certain steps have been taken to attempt to minimize errors in the administration of medications. For example, the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) has established color schemes for labels to distinguish drug classes from one another. However, errors in administration of such drugs and medication to patients continue to persist. There is therefore a need for improved devices which further minimize drug or medication administration errors.